David HuhFurther Social Enterprise with DonorsChoose.org
I first heard about the concept of “Social Enterprise” when I was in my home country, South Korea. However, it was after I came to Columbia Business School when I became seriously interested in the concept. Since Social Enterprise was a very fresh movement in Korea, it was not getting a major attention yet. Therefore, I was very surprised to see the enormous amount of interests and strong support Social Enterprise was getting at Columbia Business School. From then on, I thought about building my career in the field, and looked for an opportunity of doing my summer internship in the Social Enterprise field.
Especially, I became very interested in DonorsChoose.org. DonorsChoose.org is a non-profit venture dedicated to addressing the scarcity and inequitable distribution of learning experiences in public schools. DonorsChoose.org tries to improve public education by engaging people in an online marketplace where teachers describe and individuals can fund specific student projects. I was very impressed by the creative and holistic approach of DonorsChoose.org and wanted to contribute to and learn about its business by spending summer with them. Fortunately, I received a summer internship offer from DonorsChoose.org.
I was assigned to the Operations team and took charge of its customer management enhancement project. The basic operation of DonorsChoose.org was to manage the communication between donors and the teachers from public schools by receiving donations, transferring them to teachers and managing feedbacks from teachers and students. Especially, DonorsChoose.org paid special attention to handling feedbacks since they could show the result of donations to donors and effectively motivate them for more donations. However, since most of the feedback process was being done manually and DonorsChoose.org was growing very fast, the rising cost was a big concern for Operations team and they worried that they might not be able to handle all the necessary feedbacks in the near future. Regarding that DonorsChoose.org was run by donations from various donors and philanthropy contributions of several companies, reducing cost was much better option than asking for more money.
DonorsChoose.org assigned the task to me as I had implemented several projects of process innovation before, as a consultant. Although my experience was mostly from IT industry, I believed I could help the team on the project since the concept of reducing cost through process innovation was basically same with other IT projects. My specific responsibility was to analyze the current process, find out improvement points, build implementation plan and show the cost effects to the team. Both Mr. César Bocanegra, the Executive Vice President for Operations, and Ms. Elaine Perez, the Manager for Operations were my supervisors and I reported my work to them every week. They expected a lot from this project and thus were extremely helpful to me with every step of the project. I could get any resources I want including the company’s internal documents, external contacts and any data I needed to use. I was really impressed by their support system for summer interns, as I was introduced to every major executive of the company and made sure I had access to any help I might need from them. During my internship, whenever I needed to meet people from other teams and ask them for help, I was always welcomed by them, regardless of these people being on a Tech, Finance and/or Senior Management team.
Thanks to their strong support, my final report could cover most of the details of process innovation the organization needed, suggesting various improvements which would enable the team to reduce the cost as much as they wanted.
The internship at DonorsChoose.org was a really fulfilling experience in various aspects. First of all, I learned a lot about the reality of Social Enterprise. Before I worked at DonorsChoose.org, I did not know much about Social Enterprise and had several misconceptions. For some reasons, I thought most Social Enterprise might have very inefficient business structure and people there would not have strong passion because of relatively low compensations. I was totally wrong. People at DonorsChoose.org were really serious about establishing a highly efficient business as it was mostly run by donations, not its own profit. Surprisingly, most of their attempts were very successful and the operations and work environments were very high-level and professional. I worked for a 7000-person organization before coming to business school, but I found out that DonorsChoose.org was even more professional than my former employer in every aspects. What surprised me more were people’s attitudes at DonorsChoose.org. It might be true that they were getting less compensation than people from some other for-profit organizations, but people at DonorsChoose.org were much more passionate about achieving the goal of the organization and looked very happy with their jobs. I believe this is why the organization has become so successful and I can see the bright future leveraging modern capitalism for them.
I also made many friends at this great organization. As I struggled through the project myself, I had to ask many people at the organization for help. I could meet the CTO for analyzing the current technologies used for the business and receive all cost-related data from finance team for cost-benefit analysis. César, Executive Vice President for Operations, had been a strong support for my project and was briefed on my work every week. All the people I met at DonorsChoose.org were very kind to me and I became good friends with them. As I have a big interest in Social Enterprise, I believe these people will help me a lot when I keep pursuing my career aspirations in the near future.
Overall, my summer internship at DonorsChoose.org was a real job with actual results and responded very well to my interest in the Social Enterprise. I believe this experience means a lot to me as it will help me achieve my career goal of becoming a business leader who can contribute to the world.
